While down-filled jackets have been known for a long time, their popularity has increased greatly over the last few years by their appearance and acceptance in ski areas and for other outdoor uses. They are, however, expensive and a substantial business has grown up in the preparation and selling of such jackets in kit form for home assembly. Such kits usually consist of appropriate material precut to form a jacket of desired size and style together with down material in appropriate form for insertion into the jacket. These kits have been extremely popular and have received a great deal of attention as continuing efforts have been made to improve the resulting product while at the same time rendering easier the task of assembling and finalizing the components into a completed jacket.
One of the principal problems in this direction has been the problem of inserting the down and then sewing the jacket properly to confine the down to specified locations and prevent it from migrating in an undesirably concentrated manner into certain portions, as the lower portions, of the jacket.
While there are several ways known to the art by which the down may be handled, it results in some cses in very awkward insertion procedures and in other cases in awkward assembly of the jacket components after the down is inserted and confined.
In a continuing effort to improve this type of product and to provide a kit which is readily adaptable to home use, efforts have been made to design a product in which the down can be inserted in a simple manner into an evelope comprising predetermined panels or other components of the jacket, steps then taken for confining the down to predetermined portions of said envelope, and finally, without subsequent disturbance of the down, the components of the jacket can be fastened together quickly and reliably by a seamstress of only limited skill and utilizing nothing more complex than a home sewing machine and utilizing same in a simple manner.
Accordingly, the objects and purposes of the invention include:
1. To provide a kit from which can be assembled in a simple manner a strong, sturdy and attractive down-filled outdoor jacket, such as a ski, or other outdoor, jacket.
2. To provide a kit, as aforesaid, in which the down may be introduced into an envelope comprising a panel or other component of the jacket and may be fixed into position therein prior to the assembly together of such components.
3. To provide a kit for a jacket, as aforesaid, in which said components, after the filling and localizing of the down in the various components thereof, may be assembled together rapidly and easily and by the use of only relatively simple sewing equipment and techniques.
4. To provide a kit for a jacket, as aforesaid, wherein the material for the several panels may be chosen freely to provide a wide variety of color arrangements therein.
5. To provide a kit for a jacket, as aforesaid, which is capable of a wide range of specific design modifications for the presentation of jackets having a wide range of specific design features and characteristics in order to provide jackets having a wide range of possible uses.
Other objects and purposes of the invention will be apparent to persons acquainted with items of this nature upon a reading of the following specification and inspection of the accompanying drawings.